Trying to blend in, I don't rush outside when I hear an airplane go over. I hear planes up here but they are usually too high to be seen.
The City Folk talk about reality television, which definitely leaves me out of the conversation. I keep mum about not having television reception. They would not be able to comprehend a deliberate choice to pass on that form of entertainment.
If I did mention it, there would be questions.
What did I do at night? I have a DVD player and can check movies out at the library. I sometimes get movies from Netflix. It's not like I am off the grid.
Telling them I spent hours this week looking at the moon with my telescope would not make them feel better about my life, I'm sure. In fact, there is no quicker way to clear the room than to bring up astronomy, gardening or knitting.
However, when the conversation got around to iced coffee, I jumped in. I said, "I love it, with plenty of half and half." The response floored me. "You mean you make it yourself?" I tried to cover my eccentricity by saying it is twenty miles to any fast food place. Feeling like I wanted to have them get a tiny glimpse of my life, I mentioned that the WalMart there has a hitching post for the Amish customers' horses and buggies. Dead silence and averted glances greeted that announcement.
They are very nice people. I'm sure they prefer their lifestyle and would consider me deprived, or depraved.
That would not have been the time nor the place to mention how happy I was to find a clutch of black snake eggs in the compost pile. I failed to show them this picture of critters that may help with the grasshopper situation. Incidentally, I raked the compost back over the eggs and left them to hatch out.
Pointless to take a bouquet of flowers to gatherings with City Folk. I tried that and the blooms were examined as if they were samples of moon rocks. They elicited queries as to what they were, indicating that they had never before seen daisies and lilies. No one said they were beautiful, which they were.
When my youngest granddaughter, Molly, came to stay for a few days, we had plenty of entertainment. She's only ten, but quite smart. Her family doesn't watch TV. She loved hearing all about astronomy. She understood Universal Time, which I thought was astonishing. She quickly learned how to find Jupiter and Venus with the astronomy binoculars. They are on loan from my son, who has light pollution in town. Molly used my telescope to locate Saturn and we found M4, a favorite globular cluster in Scorpio. We looked at star charts and that little kid grasped Right Ascension and Declination.
We also picked mulberries along the road, snacking on them right there. On rainy days, we worked a big puzzle and Molly crocheted, learning new stitches. She helped me figure out a Fair Isle pattern for a vest. She picked strawberries while I mowed. We made a batch of freezer jam. Another day, we made strawberry ice cream in the Donvier ice cream maker. We gave Beau a bath out in the yard. We made Sun Oven bread. Molly helped me herd three calves back inside the fence down the road. She took pictures of butterflies on the butterfly weed flowers with my telephoto lens camera.We also went to the nearby Amish town so she could enjoy seeing all the horse-drawn buggies.
We cooked our own food. Molly made us delicious French Toast for breakfast and I made dinner. It never occurred to us to watch a movie on TV. We were too busy experiencing reality.
